Two Much: She's Re-writing The Book

October 16, 2002|By JIM HODGES Daily Press

Anaheim, where the past is generally defined as what happened yesterday, might be the capital of revisionist history this week, with Jackie Autry gliding through the Angels clubhouse, being sprayed with champagne and taking some of the credit for the Angels going to the World Series for the first time.

That's the same Jackie Autry who invokes the name of late husband Gene Autry at any and all opportunity these days. After all, weren't the Angels trying to win one for the Cowboy? Haven't they been trying for all 42 years of the franchise?

Except those with longer memories can recall his plowing money into the club until hooking up with Jackie, a banker by trade with an economic heart to match. She turned the Angels into the kind of bottom-line outfit that lured Disney to take the club off her hands after Gene died.

It's the same Jackie Autry who one said "the baseball business is a bad one,'' who refused to fund resources to keep the Angels competitive, who urged a friend to put investment money elsewhere and who took Disney's loot and rode off into the sunset in 1996.

Now it's "when I sold this club to Michael Eisner, I told him I was selling him a very good young ballclub, and if he could tweak it here and there, he would end up with a winner," she says. "And that's what he's done."

Maybe it goes down better with champagne.

PRACTICAL MAN

In one way Gene Autry was always a bottom-line guy. After noting that Roy Rogers had stuffed his horse, Trigger, for a museum in Victorville, Calif., Autry checked with a taxidermist on the cost of doing the same with his steed, Champion.

Given the price, Autry growled, "Bury the SOB.''

MATTER OF PRIORITY

There's an on-line auction to raise money for Team New Zealand's defense of the America's Cup, and $1,300 has been bid for dinner with Helen Clark, the country's prime minister. More than $3,300 was offered for breast augmentation surgery.

IT'S A REGIONAL THING

Buck Showalter was between baseball jobs for two seasons before being hired by the Texas Rangers the other day, and he tells the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that he spent much of that time watching "The Andy Griffith Show.''

All 249 shows, he said, were seen on his TV in Florida.

"You have to understand," he said. "In the South it comes on five times a day."

Says Surtain: "Different styles. He threw. I did both. I will say that I won the state-championship ring and he didn't. And I was the MVP of the game, too. I tell everyone that the quarterbacks in the state All- Star game were me, Peyton and Josh Booty, and I started. I don't tell anyone that Peyton and Josh didn't show up."

RUNNING THE RUN

Paula Radcliffe is on a crusade against performance-enhancing drugs, so she made sure everybody knew that she got no help at all in setting the world marathon record (2:17:18) Sunday in Chicago by insisting on a drug test after the race.

WHY BOTHER?

Steelers coach Bill Cowher was fed up with being 1-3 and figured his players were, so he took a break from game video last week to show the scene from 1976 movie "Network'' in which Peter Finch, aka Howard Beale, tells viewers to open their windows and yell, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.''

"That got the team excited,'' receiver Hines Ward said.

It probably didn't get them as excited as knowing they were playing Cincinnati last Sunday.

Jim Hodges can be reached at 247-4633 or by e-mail at jhodges@dailypress.com